The Top 7 Myths About Time (It’s Time to Bust)

Every Monday (or every first of the month or every new year) you say to yourself, “This will be different. I’m finally going to crush my to do list/get to the gym/be home with my family for dinner/not be overwhelmed.” And before you know it, your best intentions vaporize into a puff of smoke. You’re just as slammed as you ever were. Maybe more. You’re not further ahead at all. You’re either treading water or even further behind.

If you’ve ever struggled with that, trust me, you’re not alone.

When you really drill down on why this happens to so many leaders, you soon see that at the root of it are lies it’s time to abandon.

What you think drives what you do. If your thinking is broken, your doing will be too.

There are at least seven widely believed myths that jettison the lives of far too many leaders. And it’s not just work life that suffers. When you don’t have your time under control, your whole life suffers.

The biggest victims? You and your family.

I’m excited to have the High Impact Leader Course open to new registrants again for a limited time, and for the last time at its current pricing.

The High Impact Leader has helped thousands of leaders get their life and leadership back by getting time, energy and priorities working in their favor. I’ve added some special bonuses for this launch you won’t want to miss.

If you suffer from these myths, I think you’ll love becoming a High Impact Leader. In the course, I give you a simple, doable and powerful system to reorganize your life and leadership so you get far more done at work, far more effectively, and so you can finally be home when you’re home and be off when you’re supposed to be off.

Realizing this years ago was so sobering. It was like in an instant all my excuses were gone. I have exactly the same amount of time every day as anyone I admire.

So I made this shift: I stopped saying that I don’t have the time. And I started admitting I didn’t make it.

Try it for a week. Stop saying you don’t have the time (because you do). Start admitting you didn’t make it.

That will force you to have some hard conversations with yourself when you realize the most productive person on planet earth got the same hours you did today.

When you’re dead honest with yourself about not making the time to read bedtime stories to your kids, plan that amazing off-site, work out, do proper sermon prep, have a date night with your wife, or work on your top priorities it’s so much easier to change.

Begin here: Stop saying you don’t have the time. Start admitting you didn’t make it.

Sometimes you need the gifts of space and time. You need uninterrupted, unhurried time to explore whatever you need to explore, relationally or otherwise.

In all matters where you can be efficient, do it. An accounting system that cuts the time in half is probably worth whatever it costs. Ditto with email, routine meetings and so much of what occupies daily life.

But as efficient as you may become, you only have so many hours in a day. And part of what you do will never be fully efficient.

Stop asking yourself how to be more efficient. Start asking yourself how to be more effective.

Becoming more effective might mean you cut 17 efficient things out of your life. Sure, you may be efficient at a lot of things, but being efficient at things that don’t matter isn’t a win. It’s a loss.

Becoming more effective might mean you cut out six meetings so you can have a full day to ponder and think about the future, or to work on your message, or to handle those difficult personnel problems that never go away.

It might mean you hire someone to do your finance or find a volunteer to do expenses so you can focus on the highest value activities that move your mission forward.

Don’t ask yourself how you can be more efficient. Ask yourself how you can be more effective.

4. Sleep is for Wimps

Sleep isn’t for wimps, or for the lazy. It’s actually a core habit of many top-performing athletes, leaders and frankly, human beings.

According to medical research, chronic lack of sleep can cause weight gain, age your skin, harm your sex drive, impair memory and can contribute to illnesses as serious as diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and even premature death.

It’s a little shocking, but it’s not actually an exaggeration to say that a chronic lack of sleep can kill you.

A rested you is a better you. And a rested you is always a more productive you.

6. I Can’t Control My Calendar Because I’m Not the Boss

Every time I teach the principles in the High Impact Leader, leaders will often say “That’s great for you, because you’ve always been the senior leader. I’m not. I don’t have any control over my calendar.”

At that point, I usually ask them that given a forty hour work week, what percentage of their hours have mandated activities (meetings, do X and Y hour etc.)

Rarely does anyone tell me it’s more than 20 hours of ‘command performance.’

Which means, of course, that they have full control over half of their work week. Not bad.

Now pull the camera back a bit. There are 168 hours in every week. Which also means they have control over 148 of them: when they go to bed, when they rise, what they do. Even if all 40 hours of your work week are mandated, you still get to choose how you spend 128 hours each week.

That’s a crazy amount of control.

But typically, we love to focus on what we can’t control not on what we can.

Leaders who focus on what they can control always outperform leaders who focus on what they can’t control.

Go Way Beyond Time Management…

So how has 2018 been for you as a leader so far? You crushing your goals? Have a lot of time left over?

For many leades, the answer is sadly, no.

But listen to Isaac’s story. He recently completed the High Impact Leader course:

If you asked me earlier this year if I would want a repeat of 2017 I would have said, no way.

After walking through the High Impact Leader though, I would and will repeat what I have been doing in the last few months.

It has allowed me to be more strategic with my time, energy, and priorities like never before. I have held a full schedule for the last few months and unlike ever before, my family did not feel the weight of it, my family was prioritized at the top of it.

Thank you, Carey, for helping the end of 2017 be great and I’m very excited about what 2018 is going to hold!

Pam from Red Rock Church in Colorado Springs calls the High Impact Leader “a gamechanger.”

Dave from Invitation Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a married pastor of a new church plant who has two kids under the age of five says:

“Just wow. Thank you. The course helped me identify my priorities and work to bring clarity in all phases of my life. I feel SO, SO, SO much more freedom.”